Worst Nightmare
by Sarcasticles
Summary: The Straw Hats do, in fact, have things that keep them up at night. Chapter 9: For two years the nightmares persisted. For two years Luffy worked night and day to conquer them. With time they faded, but they never went away entirely. Luffy got the feeling they never would. Now Complete.
1. Chopper

Chopper only ever had nightmares after the Straw Hat's biggest battles.

In a way, it was to be expected. After all, it was easy for warriors to get caught up in the heat of battle. Blood and gore was simply part of being a pirate. But after the fighting wound down and the adrenaline faded, it was _Chopper _who had to deal with the aftermath.

He never worried that his friends would die. They were too strong for that.

No, Chopper dreamt about the horrors the Straw Hat Pirates would face if he wasn't doctor enough to fix them _completely_.

Some nights it was Sanji, forced to use a cane as his hips, knees, and ankles broke down, unable to handle the torque his martial art put upon them.

Other days it was Usopp, crippled by repeated trauma to his back and suffering from panic attacks related to his many phobias

Or Nami, blinded by her own lightning, unable to lead the crew…

Or Robin, unable to fulfill her dream as dementia corroded her mind…

Or Franky, forever hooked to life support because no one could figure out how his mechanical and biological parts meshed together in a critical moment…

Or Brook, kept from playing the instruments he loved because of debilitating arthritis…

Or Luffy, suffering from the repercussions of a stroke as his dangerous fighting style raised his blood pressure to levels not even his rubber body could handle…

And Zoro. Chopper's nightmares about Zoro were worst of them all. The one-day greatest swordsman in the world was too stubborn to die, even when it would probably be a blessing. It was all too easy to see how one day an errant slash might perforate his bowel, necessitating surgery that would forever take away from his dignity. Or maybe falling from ridiculous heights would someday catch up to him, and he would break his neck. Or maybe he would just lose a limb or two in battle…

Maybe maybe maybe. If there were hundreds of ways to die horribly, then there were thousands of ways to live miserably, and because of Chopper's medical expertise he knew every. Single. One.

Chopper started his journey with a desire to create a panacea to prove Dr. Hiliruk right. As he traveled, his motivations changed. He had to be prepared for every possible ailment—from cures to poisons from extinct plants to how to unfreeze someone who had been turned into a block of ice—because with this crew _anything _was possible, and that uncertainty was the scariest thing in the world.


	2. Robin

Her nightmares didn't always stay the same. Humans were not a static creature, and as a person grew and changed so did their worst fears.

As a little girl, Robin feared not being good enough, for her teachers or her mother. But then came the Buster Call, and she became the Last Oharan. She had been given no choice but to be the best. The legacy of every archeologist to ever be trained at the Tree of Knowledge was placed on her small shoulders. It was a terrible burden to bear, but one she refused to give up. Their confidence in her ability gave her strength, and Robin persevered for twenty long, lonely years.

For a long time after that, her dreams consisted of being chased by a shadow-monster, a consuming void seeking to devour her as she ran and ran and ran, never finding rest. Robin had conquered those dreams by becoming a monster herself, protecting her vulnerable heart with a cloak of darkness. She could be scarier than her enemies, Robin discovered. Monsters preyed on the weak, so she refused to be weak. It was as simple as that, and the transformation from frightened child to Demon of Ohara nearly destroyed her.

Then the Straw Hats found her, adopted her against her will, and Robin dreamed of the day when they would learn to hate her. It was a soul-crushing inevitability, and after learning what it was like _not _to be alone, she decided she would rather die than go back to the way things were.

_That _dream faded away with a single shot, her _family _declaring war on her behalf. Consequences and logic be damned, she was theirs and they were hers. Not even the largest of monsters could stand in the way.

But instead of defeating her nightmares for good, in time they only shifted. Robin watched helplessly from thousands of miles away as her captain became more dangerous in the eyes of the government than she ever was. It sparked a question: What if…what if someday he did to her what she attempted to do to him? It was all too easy to picture, and for once Robin hated the morbid bent her imagination often took.

Luffy always offered her his hat in these new dreams—something he had never done in reality—before handing himself over to the World Government in exchange for her life. He would give her one last grin, offering up the assurance that this wasn't her fault. It was, after all, the duty of the captain to watch over his crew.

And Robin would always be powerless to stop him from succeeding where she had failed.

Invariably she would wake up in a cold sweat, heart pounding in her chest until she remembered that it wasn't real. They were separated for this very reason; when the Straw Hat Pirates reunited on Saboady they would be strong enough to challenge the world's monsters and win. Until then…

Robin settled back in bed, lying in perfect stillness. Even if she could go back to sleep, there was little point in willing returning to the terrors that haunted her mind. Better to stay awake and dream for the day when she was back to the one place she truly belonged.


	3. Sanji

Every once in a while Sanji would talk in his sleep.

It wasn't very often, thank God, and it was rarely coherent. But when he saw the shitty swordsman or his moronic captain look at him oddly as he served breakfast, Sanji would know that, annoyingly enough, he had spent the night mumbling and moaning.

Zoro would have the audacity to look at him as if he were some perverted freak—as if he thought no one saw how he touched that white sword of his—but Luffy only would look curious. Sanji didn't mind that as much. Curious was much better than accusational.

And even if his crewmates realized he suffered from bad dreams—which Sanji didn't think they did, the men were much to thickheaded to process thought and the women slept in a different room entirely—there was no way for them to know _what_ griped his mind.

It wasn't dreams of the past, of hunger and starvation, although in a way that was part of his fears. No, Sanji had nightmares were much, much worse.

He dreamed of being alone.

Food brought people together. Parties, weddings, celebrations, funerals, baby showers, birthdays…they were all commemorated with food. Sanji would know; he had catered enough of the damn things while on the Baratie. It was why his idiotic captain enjoyed post-adventure celebrations as much as he did. They brought together his two most treasured things: people and food. Enjoying a good party was the one thing Sanji could truly say he had in common with Luffy.

Famine turned brother against brother. For God's sake, he had tried to _kill _the shitty geezer all those years ago because there had been no food. Even before those fateful days shipwrecked on that forsaken rock, Sanji had experienced the togetherness that came with sharing a meal.

But his nightmares were more than starvation. Sanji feared the day he would wake up an old man, companionless. Despite his superior charm and sophistication he had yet to find someone to share his life with, if only for a night.

To be lonely was a terrible thing, and Sanji sought to avoid it as much as possible.

Which is why he endured the company of the boorish, uncultured swine; jumpy, excitable idiots; and childish, irritating fools. And the ladies. The ladies were welcome any time.

So when the shitty swordsman would look his way, Sanji would glower and raise one foot threateningly, but not say a word. After all, it didn't matter if he found All Blue if there was no one to share it with.


	4. Nami

Before Nami was ever a navigator, she had been a thief and con artist. She had unashamedly led people around, and not in a good way. There was no dispute that it was one of her greatest skills, outside of cartography.

Sometimes she would stay up late at night and wonder what horrible damage she could do. With few exceptions, the Straw Hat Pirates didn't have a whit of sense. Even Robin was more apt to go with the flow than to speak against one of Luffy's insane plans. It was more amusing that way, she would say quietly while Nami banged her head against the wall. Amusing and entertaining.

Nami preferred to substitute the words _stupid _and _illogical_, but in the end it was a matter of semantics. Luffy got what he wanted, and what Luffy wanted was adventure.

_But…_a small portion of her mind would whisper on such nights…_You could get him to stop if you really tried. It doesn't take much to distract a moron, after all. _

_Shut up_, Nami would answer, too frightened by her own influence to be worried about the fact she was talking to herself. Sometimes it was scary knowing how easy it was to manipulate her friends, how a coy smile and a well-placed word could get them to do whatever she wanted. Nami navigated. She _led_, sometimes in more obvious ways than Luffy ever did.

The Nami who spent eight years scrapping for money and power was pleased at the thought. The Nami who spent a lifetime trying to understand what it meant to have a family, less so. There was a struggle within her, a duality that struggled for dominance. A part of her that saw people as tools to be used, which fought against the part that saw people as deserving of respect.

But it was so _easy_. Chopper and his youth was naïve, Sanji and his eyes for anything with a pretty face love struck, Luffy and his idiocy easily sidetracked, Zoro and his honor effortlessly manipulated, Brook and his trusting nature simple to mislead, Usopp and his fears trickable, Franky and his temper putty in her hands.

Robin's paranoid personality would probably be the most difficult of all, but even she wasn't above Nami's ability. After all, Nami had been Robin's first _real _friend among the Straw Hat Pirates. It was inevitable considering the living arrangements that Robin knew Nami best and vise versa. And when one hadn't had even a single friend in twenty years or longer it was easy to see how a normally level headed, rational person might somehow become decidedly less rational where those friends were concerned.

Sometimes thinking of how she treated Luffy when they first met made Nami sick. She had thought she had everything in her life under control, when really she had been standing on a house of cards that collapsed on itself.

The solution to these fears—the nightmare that she would someday send her crew into a storm that would tear them apart—was to not lead, but to guide. By outward appearances Nami had more control over the crew than Luffy did, but she was not the Straw Hat's captain. If someone looked close they would see how Luffy had a better grasp on his crew than any other. His was an odd sort of captainship, but there was no doubting his authority.

After being freed from her past, Nami had become a navigator. Her job wasn't to stand ahead of her crew and yank them where she wanted to go, but to stand beside them and point out all of the possibilities.


	5. Zoro

Zoro had nightmares about stairs.

Not literally, of course. To fear something so mundane was ridiculous and unfitting of a man walking down the bloody way of the warrior. Zoro did not quake in terror every time he thought about stairs. Not that he brooded about stairs. Often. Anyone who suggested otherwise would become intimately familiar with the edge of his blade.

He did, however, fear what they represented.

Stairs proved that life wasn't fair. They showed how a dream could be needlessly snuffed out unfulfilled. How sometimes accidents happened, people died, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

Could Kuina have become the best if given the same chance? Was it possible for Zoro to die that night? Did the same fate that led her to an early grave destine him to a glorious future?

It was probably a good thing Zoro wasn't a superstitious man, otherwise he'd probably dedicate his life to cutting down the asshole who had cheated Kuina out of her chance. But he didn't believe in that kind of nonsense, so he had to settle for making sure the same thing never happened to his crew.

Zoro was not the first mate of the Straw Hat Pirates. Luffy had never made such a declaration, and Zoro didn't want that kind of responsibility anyway. But he was their protector, and he even if it meant he gave up his own dream, he would do everything in his power to make sure that history did not repeat itself again.


	6. Brook

After fifty years of isolation, Brook's mind was a very strange place. Sometimes he saw things that were not there (though he had no eyes) and heard the singing of those who had been dead for decades. His dreams were vivid and colorful and felt so very real, and there were times when he fell asleep it felt like he had just woken up.

Brook's nightmares were just as strong, and there were nights he felt like he was trapped in his own insanity.

But dreams—good and bad—never lasted, and even if they never went away entirely, the longer he traveled with the Straw Hat Pirates the less he saw of the ghosts of his past. There was much to be said about the benefits of sunlight to a man's soul, and for the first time since his death Brook felt truly alive.

It seemed impossible to think that he would ever be free of the Florian Triangle, much less have a second chance at fulfilling his promise. To think that Laboon was still waiting and that Luffy had met him would have been unbelievable had Brook not heard it with his own ears (though he had none).

Maybe he was only living a dream and someday he would wake up surrounded by the mists and the horror of Thriller Bark. Maybe the Straw Hat Pirates were nothing more than a cruel fantasy constructed by an insane skeleton. Or maybe he was nothing more than a dead man walking in a world only meant for the living.

Brook's mind was a strange place. He concentrated on living each moment to the fullest, because if he didn't he would retreat to the dark recesses of his soul, the pit where each of his nightmares was born. He had to fight, just like he had fought every day for fifty years, for the reality which was his present, because if he didn't he would only lose himself in his past.


	7. Franky

_What makes a man a man?_

Franky was forced to ponder the question as he sees himself reflected in a pool of water. He doesn't spend much time looking at himself anymore, if only because it's nearly impossible to squeeze himself into the bathroom to look in the mirror.

It was a good thing that his _super _new body didn't have much need for that particular room, at least not in the traditional sense. He was more scrap than flesh these days, having spent the better part of two years slowly replacing muscle, bone, and blood with gears, steel, and cola.

The only exception is his back, and Franky can't see much of that anyway, so it's not like he cares. He spent many a sleepless night trying to decide whether or not to rig up a system that would upgrade his one weakness before deciding against it, because even if he did have a _super _idea or dozen on how to utilize that space to install different functions that he otherwise would be unable to implement, there was something to be said about keeping some part of himself the same.

Franky has no regrets about turning his body into a weapon. He's a cyborg, and damn proud of it. He took ownership of his workmanship, and would stand by it until the bitter end. Sure he looked different and there were some things he could no longer do, but he had friends that accepted him and his dream awaited him. Life was good.

At the same time Franky couldn't forget Kuma, the man who had replaced himself bit by bit, until he was no longer human. Thanks to Vegapunk's technology, the line between man and machine was a blurry one, and Franky had nightmares that one day he would inadvertently cross over, and there would be no turning back.

It was almost a relief that he still had nightmares. Nightmares meant he could still dream, and machines couldn't dream. Franky could fire lasers out of his hands and light out of his nipples, but there was still a bone-chilling fear and a sense of helplessness when someone attacked his back. His weaknesses made him human, and that wasn't something he was willing to give up, no matter the consequences.


	8. Usopp

Usopp waking hours were often a walking nightmare. The Grand Line—nay, the world!—was a terrifying place. If something wasn't trying to eat you it was trying to kill you just for the fun of it. There were sea monsters. There were pirates. The seas themselves seemed to want you dead.

And it was a dream come true.

For the self-aware coward, the Grand Line was a place to avoid like the plague, and not just because you might just catch the plague while visiting. But for the self-aware coward who wanted to someday be brave…the Grand Line was the place to be.

Usopp fought against evil fishmen and corrupt kings. He faced Warlords and gods and lived to tell the tale. Somewhere along the line, he got a little bit stronger, a little bit more sure in his abilities, until he began to delude himself into believing that the Straw Hats could take on the world.

Then Aokiji happened, and those delusions were torn away leaving behind the stark, naked truth. The Straw Hats were small fries. Weak. Lucky to be alive. And Usopp, poor, pathetic Usopp, was the weakest of them all.

For the first time since his mother died, Usopp's fears crept into his dreams unbidden. His visions of heroism and greatness crumbled into dust, leaving a bleak and grey picture of his future. Crippling self-doubt and negativity—usually buried so deep—bubbled to the surface, and Usopp realized that he could never, ever fulfill the expectations he had set for himself. He could never be like his dad.

This realization was devastating, but Usopp didn't have much time to dwell on it. Robin had tried to sacrifice herself for their sakes, and the Straw Hats were attempting to heroically save her. Usopp was no hero, never could be, but he couldn't let her die.

What Usopp didn't know at the time, what he wouldn't understand for several years, was that if he was to be a brave warrior of the sea, the lies he had built up for himself _had _to be destroyed. It was necessary for him to face his nightmares to overcome them and rebuild his dreams on what was real. Then, and only then, would he understand what courage truly was.


	9. Luffy

Day after day, week after week, and month after month; for two years it was the same. Always the same. Luffy couldn't forget no matter how hard he tried, as if the memory had left a permanent imprint on his rubber brain that refused to go away.

And it just wasn't when he slept that he had nightmares. Sometimes while he was waiting for his meat to cook Luffy would mistake the sizzle of frying fat for that of burning flesh. He would smell the blood and the smoke, and hear Ace's last, agonizing breaths. Luffy would never have much of an appetite after these flashbacks, and if Old Man Rayleigh thought it was strange when his protégé went off to the woods alone, he didn't say anything.

But it was worse at night, always worse at night, because his imagination would add things that had never happened at the Summit War. In his dreams Ace never found his peace, died without ever finding his reason to smile. The bastards Akainu and Blackbeard would mock Ace's existence and declare Luffy a worthless captain who not only had failed to protect his crew, but didn't even manage to save his brother.

Sometimes there were the bastards who killed Sabo, too, seeking to take away his freedom.

For two years the nightmares persisted. For two years Luffy worked night and day to conquer them. With time they faded, but they never went away entirely. Luffy got the feeling they never would.

When the Straw Hat Pirates reunited, they marveled at how their captain seemed to be exactly the same. Slowly they realized that he _had _changed, you just had to know him well enough to see it.

Luffy had always been driven. Not a day passed when he didn't express in some way his dream of becoming the King of the Pirates. But after the death of his brother he became more fiercely jealous of that promise, because in his eyes, the Pirate King was the man with the most freedom in the world, and a man wasn't free unless he could protect what he loved.

Ace had found his freedom in the end, and Luffy was determined to do the same. Maybe the nightmares would never go away entirely, but with the help of his crew he would never have to live through them again.

* * *

**AN**: And that's a wrap. Thanks for those who stuck with me through this project. It was a fun little character study, and I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I did writing. As this is the last chapter, I'd appreciate feedback on your favorite/least favorite, things that were good, things that could have been better, etc (that includes all you fave and runners. I know who you are).

As for what I'm working on next, I'm concentrating mostly on _Outcast _for now, but I've got a few chapters for _Sea Shanties _in the works, as well as a new fic set with the pre-time skip crew that I want to have more finished before posting.

As always, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you next time.


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